Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T21:07:50.725Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Esthetics of Perversion: Gothic Artifice in Henry James and Witold Gombrowicz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Patricia Merivale
Patricia Merivale*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount, like Gombrowicz’ Pornografia and Cosmos, are not only Gothic artist parables in the nineteenth-century mode but also metaphysical detective stories and self-reflexive texts in the contemporary mode. Their heroes, whether voyeurs or stage directors, manipulate other, innocent characters into the substance of their own fictions: the creation of texts is thus seen as a morally tainted endeavor.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 5 , October 1978 , pp. 992 - 1002
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 The Turn of the Screw, in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, x (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), 15–138; The Sacred Fount, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959); Cosmos, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1967); Pornografia, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: Grove, 1968). Hereafter these editions are cited in the text by the abbreviations TS, SF, C, and P.

2 For a fuller discussion of the “metaphysical detective story,” see my article “The Flaunting of Artifice in Borges and Nabokov,” in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 209–24.

3 See the manipulative artifice of “locked” diaries in Tanizaki's The Key, the pseudorational sadistic youth gang of Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the pursuit of a lovely, teasing youth by an elderly author in Death in Venice, and the extrapolation of this theme under other skies—Mishima's Forbidden Colours and Humbert Humbert and the “small ghost” of Lolita's childhood, killed by his quasi-incestuous lust—all offer significant analogues to the James and Gombrowicz texts.

4 Giorgio Melchiori, “Cups of Gold for the Sacred Fount: Aspects of James's Symbolism,” Critical Quarterly, 7 (1965), 305–06.

5 This concept is taken a stage further by Naomi Lebowitz, who attractively interprets the story as James's own account of his struggle with a group of fictional characters, in The Imagination of Loving: Henry James's Legacy to the Novel (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 120–29. Is this view perhaps more Pirandellian or Queneauvian than seems likely? In any event James, like Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, has written a better story than his artist-hero has.

6 For two of these points, though not for the shadow plot, see Philip M. Weinstein, Henry James and the Requirements of the Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 116–17: “her real intimacy may be with Long”; “as she gains power, he [the narrator] weakens.”

7 “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes,” Neue Gedichte.

8 See Gombrowicz' Preface to Cosmos, trans. Georges Sedir (Paris: Denoël, 1966), pp. 9–10, for this quotation and the two previous ones. The English translations are mine.

9 See Jean-Marie Benoist, “L'Ancillarité chez Gombrowicz,” in Gombrowicz, ed. Constantin Jelenski and Dominique de Roux (Paris: Cahiers de l'Herne, 1971), p. 243, for an interpretation of this episode and its antecedents in terms of “oralité ... une mise en question de la parole, donc du signe,” as the finger of the “déchiffreur” encounters the source of language and receives no sign; the incident is a kind of skit, in semiological terms, on the limits of semiology. The value of a linguistic approach is also stressed by David Brodski, “Gombrowicz and Nabokov,” in Gombrowicz, p. 306; such an approach has been a powerful temptation to recent critics of The Sacred Fount, a text that can be seen as a fight to a draw between rival interpretations of a sign system, both as relativistic as they are internally consistent.

10 Compare “the gathering dusk of her fate” (SF, p. 108) and numerous other examples in both texts (e.g., C, pp. 138, 142–43, 166).

11 Fuller arguments for the existence of the shadow plot can be found in a satisfyingly extreme form in, for instance, John Lydenberg, “The Governess Turns the Screws,” in A Casebook on ... The Turn of the Screw, ed. Gerald Willen (New York: Crowell, 1960), pp. 273–90. The clearest statement of the double plot and its double audience is found, albeit parenthetically, in Juliet McMaster, “‘The Full Image of a Repetition’ in The Turn of the Screw,” Studies in Short Fiction, 6 (1973), 377–82. Christine Brooke-Rose, in 'The Squirm of the True: An Essay in Non-Methodology,“ PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 1 (1976), 265–94, and its sequel, subtitled ”A Structural Analysis of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw,“ pp. 513–46, declares TS to be ”a wholly ambiguous text,“ in which every word supports either interpretation.

12 See McMaster, “‘Image of a Repetition,’” for a fuller discussion of the visual “doubling” and other elements of complicity between the ghosts and the Governess. Brooke-Rose elaborates essentially similar points in ‘The Mirror Structure,“ Pt. ii, Sec. 2, of ”The Squirm of the True,“ pp. 516–28. She seems not to have seen the McMaster article.

13 Cf. the crushing of the centipede in Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie.

14 “I became the writer whose subject is Form” (Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament, trans. Alastair Hamilton [London: Calder and Boyars, 1973], p. 154).